Low life
Clocking on
Jeffrey Bernard
A heading in my local paper caught my eye last week, and that takes some catching when it's the Newbury Weekly News in pursuit. Usually, the headings concern gymkhanas, harvest festivals, Women's Institute happenings or spell-binding occurrences like a local council moving a bus stop fifty yards up the road. But this heading had me waxing more nostalgic than I felt since I last heard 'We'll Meet Again'. It said, 'Work-Shy Man Is Now A Reformed Character'. I liked it instantly and plunged on into the epic.
It seems that the character in question 'hit the headlines' last year when he was taken to court for failing to maintain his wife and children. Apart from being work-shy, he couldn't hold down a job because he was so bad at time-keeping. The Department of Health and Social Security even offered to buy him an alarm clock to get him up in the mornings, which! thought was nice of them. Anyway, the second time he appeared in court he pleaded guilty to dishonestly using £3.92 worth of electricity. The Southern Electricity Board had previously cut off his supply when his arrears topped the £279 mark and he reconnected the stuff himself.
The defending counsel said that the defendant was now holding down a fulltime job and that, 'he has undergone a complete transformation not only concerning large things like how to manage his finances but also little things like personal hygiene. The family's future looks better than it has done for some considerable time.' Finally, our character got two years' probation. Well, I ask you! It's a sad but piddling story and I am only sorry that I wasn't on or anywhere near the bench to offer my summing up.
First, I would like to take the phrase 'work-shy'. Now it may be because I have never been able to see the virtue of hard work for its own sake or it may be because I've very rarely had a job I've enjoyed, but at any rate I find it an extremely offensive phrase, used to label people who are either depressives, emotionally unstable in other ways or who have a simple objection to working at jobs like washer-upper, factory assembly line hand or shop assistant or any other bloody job that doesn't involve a three-hour lunch break that dissolves into an afternoon session in a club. If someone is just lazy then it's a pussy-footing phrase, like 'distressed gentlefolk' which simply means skint persons who talk proper.
The other thing that struck me about the case was that having used the phrase 'work-shy' defending counsel goes on to use the phrase 'holding down' a job. Now how can a man be shy of something he's holding down? For that matter why shouldn't a man be shy of something so horrendous that it has to be held down?
In any event I am glad I wasn't in court to sum up, for who on earth would want to be in a court where counsel and, presumably, bench and audience, hold personal hygiene to be a little thing? Then, dismissing hygiene with a wave of an, I assume, incredibly grubby hand, counsel gave out the flannel about the family's future being better than it has been for some considerable time. Well, he's got to try and get his client off so we'll let him have his flannel, but will the future be so rosy? I doubt it, unless he gets a job he likes and! also doubt it, unless probation officers have changed considerably since my day.
Have I ever told you about my probation officer? Well, I'm going to anyway. I got a year's probation an age ago for stealing a book from a shop in Notting Hill Gate which had some nice shops then. It was a book on Byzantine art, actually, but anyway I got this year's probation and lo and behold my probation officer turned out to be homosexual but nasty with it. He said that if I didn't. . . then he'd have me for a breach of probation. The only thing that saved me was the fact that in spite of being work-shy was, after all, the distressed son of distressed gentlefolk. If! hadn't talked proper I would have met a fate worse than death.
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